Large open world landscape setup

Development World Creation
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Hello

I am very new to Unreal Engine, as i initially picked it up to learn something very new.
The only thing i ever did once was make maps in Hammer for CS like 20 years ago.

But i have a question regarding very large open worlds and what the best approach is to get started on making one?

The reason i am asking here, despite finding quite usefull tutorials online here and other places, is because of issues that i ran in to already.

If for example i make a single landscape that is essentially 30km², without even the initial flat landscape loaded, it takes up so much RAM just for that. For example i have 32GB and after just letting UE create the landscape without even a heightmap, the usage spikes in task manager to 28-30GB, but when i look up the map resource details and set it to memory, unloaded it takes 4.4GB. Even compiling that to run alone on Windows uses up a lot.

What’s the best way to make very large landscapes and to make everything flow into eachother well?
If, for example, i wanted to make a large 80km² map, is it best to make 8 landscapes each 10km² and connect them together?

But what about the potential use of heightmaps then, to make them flow into eachother well?
Or is it more common to use terrain plugins that let you “paint” entire mountains from a brush?

Any tips or tricks, tutorials anyone can advise to go about making very large open worlds like this?

Kind regards

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Level stream will allow you to load and unload chunks of landscape on call, using a landscape streaming volume you can set it to load a certain chunk when the player comes within distance of it …I’ll post a pretty easy tutorial on the basic runarounds of it, cool part is you can stream in multiple levels to the persistent level, and still sculpt them, and changes will reflect in that chunks native level, that way you can line the landscapes up but then paint and populate them separately if you do choose, the tutorial just uses basic blocks as “levels” but it works if you add levels with landscape too

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